The Media core is designed to develop, catalog, evaluate, and distribute various types of media (stimuli) that can be used as prompts to affective experience in Center-related projects, as well as in research laboratories throughout the world. The specific aims of the Media core are to: (1) accumulate, organize, and evaluate stimuli in various stimulus modalities, create media libraries, and serve as a coordinating center for distributing these materials, (2) acquire normative affective ratings for stimulus sets which can be used to select, balance, and control parameters of emotion in laboratory studies, 3) develop and implement storage systems for the stimulus sets, which can be used both for distributing and archiving the materials; (4) evaluate and select specific technologies for cost-effective, computer-controlled presentation of stimuli, including still images, sound, texts, and moving images; and (5) serve as a resource to the individual projects for problems that may arise in specific experimental applications involving the stimuli. Primary goals in the project period are to add exemplars to the International Affective Picture System (lAPS), International Digitized Sounds (lADS), Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW), and Affective Norms for English Text (ANET), and to distribute these media to center investigators and world-wide. Collection of affective ratings for different ethnic groups and countries are proposed, to broaden the use of these stimuli. Prompted by relevant experimental and theoretical issues, stimulus characteristics of duration, movement, complexity, and discriminability are investigated in different media, with a goal of determining features important for experimental control.